Seeking and Giving Social Support and Children's Friendship Adjustment
Results indicated that children's goals were significantly and meaningfully related to their strategies. Children's goals and strategies were also related to how many best friends children had and the quality of their real-life best friendship. These findings extend our limited knowledge about the social skills children need for friendship success. Other results indicated that girls were more likely than boys to expect that talking about problems would make them feel better, which helped account for gender differences in goals and strategies, particularly those involving self-disclosure. Previous research has not identified processes that underlie gender differences in self-disclosure. Finally, children's perceptions of challenging situations with peers as upsetting and as frequent were also assessed in this study and were found to be related to both children's goals and strategies and their social adjustment with peers.
Sociology, Individual and Family Studies
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign